Blog Posts Across The Applied Improvisation Network

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My awareness includes a universe wherein there is an intangible rate of exchange between people. The phrase I've coined mentally for this exchange is Alternate Currency. Alternate Currency is not of the material world and as such defies being stuffed into a box and or being quantified.

My artistic friends live, work and play, largely in this universe propelled by alternate currency. My artistic friends honor the intrinsic…

I have looked to the groups of central and eastern Europe and found too much of our own theatre wanting. For theirs is a Theatre of the Heart, a drama of the soul, s stage of tears and laughter alike, of hate, love, loss and renewal. Of blood and fire. Of the family, the clan, the ancestors, of the madness of change, of loyalty and loss, of revolution, of being caged and breaking free, of soul-touch and conflict.

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The hardest part is the easiest part: stepping into the moment before being in the moment. In that blink of an eye before the now, what are we doing? If we are plotting the next blink, planning the instant to follow, are we improvising at all?

Stepping over the precipice and finding we do no fall, held in the mid-air of the emerging now, by our own willed playfulness.

In that moment, the whole of reality becomes renewed…

"It is an art to dream a dream, a science to dream an illusion"

"It is so often the insane who pronounce the sane mad."

"The greatest cruelty is to target an honest person for being honest."

One strategy for justifying any almost any action is to employ the language of law. Clever arguments are brought forth in the name of sincerity.

One example of this is the dogmatic use of "positivity" as an antidote to any personal action that causes pain and hur…

A perspective on personal conflict

The "Who blew the wind?" phenomenon crops up often in inter-personal conflict situations where both parties are convinced that the other party "started it" and that all they are now doing is reacting innocently to an attack. It often crops up in de-briefs from impro'd organisational theatre work exploring conflict.

Over time the audit trail back to the original trigger (which may also be in their heads rather an any explicit de…

But it's not ours.

It's the IAL and I've just delivered a session on using Improv for teambuilding. I enjoyed sharing our message with others and they were as accepting of the strengths and transformational power of our work as we could hope for.

And then there was the party where during the band breaks I got some people to play some games for everyone.

Now I know that people are more interested in when our own conference will be and I…

We worked with the theme of distraction, on stage and in life. Each actor chose a short monologue, which they performed in front of the group who sat in a traditional audience seating. At the end of the performance the actor reflected on any distractions that had helped or hinder their performance. Distractions seemed to take them out of character, even if only for a moment, but it was enough to dilute the performance and some members of the audience could immediately tell. Distracti…

Critical Incidents in Acting

idea for the using the term "Critical Incident" came to me during a performance of Re-Inventing the Cheese, our sketch show based on the world of work. I was working on a monologue with one of our actors, Augustine Flint-Hartle. The monologue was all about a well-intentioned but misguided manager who tries to get everyone “involved” in a work based conference only to discover that all of her plans have come to nothing, and nobody has turned up! The way…

The classic "right-brain", "left-brain" model of creativity is really just an invention of "left-brain thinking". Most "right-brain" thinking is really just an intellectual version of "left brain" thinking, trying to talk itself into being more creative. However it remains locked in the left brain.

Just as a reminder:

Left-brain is the "rational, analytical" side

Right-brain is the "imaginative, intuitive" side

In my view and experience of working in th…

In the heart of the Ashdown Forest stands one of the oldest Oak Trees in England. Here, Winter settles with its full force, a moon-white frost lying at dawn until the November sun is high over the Kent horizon, teasing its way through the thick canopy of trees, bereft of leaves in the late Autumn cold.

The Oak tree is home to several families of grey squirrels who burrow through crackling leaves and cold, damp moss hillocks, and mazes of overgrown roots.

Here, a squirrel of some…

An exercise...

Hello to all of my AIN friends! I must admit that I am new to social networking, and in fact, this is my very first blog ever! :-)

When I received requests from several AIN folks to become their "friend" on this site after creating my profile, I felt honored, and I dutifully responded. I have also invited several people to become my "friends" on the site. Then I looked at all of the faces of our wonderful group, and I thought to myself, aren't we all "friends?" I began to wonder if rec…

I get the impression that many of us are single person entities or small businesses. As such I think it can make approaching large corporations more intimidating because you have to start answering all the "how many people can you handle" or "are you able to handle a project of this size" questions.

So I 'm thinking that what we have here is the possibility of thinking of AIN as an extension of our businesses. And I realize that in many ways that is what it was intended to be. I'm eith…

After a year off from attending the AIN conference, I came away from Banff experiencing a varied canvas of impressionistic thoughts and feelings – reconnection, engagement, involvement, excitement, enervation, second winds, expansiveness tempered by occasional insularity, a continual sense of being present at the creation (is improv anything less?). After three days of basking in the energy and spirit of the AIN community, I returned to Ohio inspired, reju…

Peak experiences

"Feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of ecstacy and wonder and awe, the loss of placement in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that the subject was to some extent transformed and strengthened…

Ssssshhhh

All 3 boys are asleep ... my wife is "out on the town" with some others local mums ... Viv has just invited me to this Applied Improv Network! And then I receive a message from Paul Z Jackson (welcoming me) after I used his Solution Focus stuff at a workshop yesterday. Spooky stuff.

Anyway, hello to you all ... hope the recent conference was enoyable ... glad to feel connected to a community and a topic for which I share some real passion :-)

Cheers

Geoff…

I've never experienced a social web site before. The entry in to it is so unusual and scary, in a sophomoric way. What a head game! I ask someone to "be my friend", and then wait to see whether they said yes or no? I thought I was far past this stage. I would never have done it in middle school. And frankly, where I went to school it would have been social suicide. Better to have no friends than to break down and ask someone such a tragic, vulnerable question. Aloof is the only way to go. Yet…

What I really want to do is to write and process my experience at my first AIN conference in Banff. However, I have soooo much going on and so much to digest, that I think it will have to wait until later.…

I'm not sure if anyone else has come up against this but I imagine you have at some level. I am constantly amazed at the number of times I have finished a workshop and someone will come up to me and say, "This was really great but I could never do this at my work." Or the number of peopel who tell me they just had a training session on how to say "no"...like that ever seems to be a problem.

The conflict between being asked to foster support and creativity in teams and the way they are…

I have been in and out of focus with AIN since it started...or I think I have anyway, but I would like to continue to get more involved so this my first step in doing that. I'd like to thank those who've managed to build the organization into the lively and active group that it is today. And I also like to thank whoever is responsible for getting this website together. It's very intuitive and easy to navigate which is a plus for me because I get lost easy. Truth be told I kind of like getting…

I write this as the conference in Banff is now officially all over. The Europeans are on the other side of the room talking about the upcoming conference in Norway, and I am still on my laptop after Lief's intro to this terrific new website.

The conference was rich, layered, enlivening, learningful, and gratifyingly self-authored. The Open Space work continues to be a subtle shaper of how we "do" us. Some great feedback-gathering techniques were used (and learned) to play back to the g…